The post-election autopsies and fingerpointing have been non-stop in the wake of Donald Trump's presidential victory over Hillary Clinton. James Comey, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is now among those officially being blamed by the Clinton campaign.

Further Reading

According to The Hill, Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta reportedly told supporters in a private conference call Thursday that Comey is "who we think may have cost us the election."

Podesta was referencing Comey's actions last month. Eleven days before the election, Comey spun heads from the left and the right when he forwarded a letter to congressional leaders, saying the bureau had renewed its investigation into Clinton's use of a private e-mail server during her time as secretary of state. Months before in July, Comey announced Clinton was "extremely careless" but recommended no prosecution after an FBI investigation.

In his statements, Podesta also blamed the media for the Clinton loss. "The media always covered her as the person who would be president and therefore tried to eviscerate her before the election, but covered Trump who was someone who was entertaining and sort of gave him a pass," he said, according to The Hill.

David Kravets
The senior editor for Ars Technica. Founder of TYDN fake news site. Technologist. Political scientist. Humorist. Dad of two boys. Been doing journalism for so long I remember manual typewriters with real paper. Emaildavid.kravets@arstechnica.com//Twitter@dmkravets

"The media always covered her as the person who would be president and therefore tried to eviscerate her before the election, but covered Drumpf who was someone who was entertaining and sort of gave him a pass,"

the media was on Clinton's side, this little niggle probably didnt even register on most peoples radar

+ uh, can someone attempt to explain their thoughts? the media was Hilariously Hilary. Why do you think they were blown away by the "upset" victory? Pro Hilary news swept social media and television, and continues to do so after the election.

This doesn't shock me. Though I'd never blame one thing as the "reason" she didn't win. It was a collection of things. However, whatever Comey's motivations were and regardless of the truth behind what he released less than a week before election day, the shadow of criminality and doubt caused irreparable damage to her as a candidate. It was WILDLY irresponsible for him to do that. His admission later that they found nothing and she was cleared was merely a footnote.

At that point, who really cared about Clinton's email that was also an undecided voter?

Comey clearly abused his position of power, and he's done a bunch of stupid stuff in the past ("Going Dark"), and there's no way he should be Director of the FBI in light of the relentless cavalcade of literal horribles, but blaming him for the Clinton loss just doesn't seem supported by any information that isn't the result of discredited methodology.

Yeah, maybe, it was so close a lot of things could've put it over the top.

But let's be real here: rust belt voters who supported Presidents from LBJ to Obama lost faith in the Democratic Party. They didn't believe Democrats had a solution to making living in the rust belt suck less. So they turned on Democrats.

If Democrats want to win again in 2018 and 2020 they need to start speaking to those voters' economic anxieties which they misdirect into racial anxiety. They obviously don't respond well to a "shame on you for bigotry" message, even though, yes, shame on them.

To win them back, Democrats need to talk more about class. Social justice is a big deal, but so is economic justice. Let's not underrate class in intersectionality.

What cost you people the election was that you put up a bad candidate, one so bad that it kept voters away from the polls, and swept the Republicans to power.

As Glenn Greenwald said, recently:

Quote:

When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.

Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.

But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.

It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.

Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently.

At that point, who really cared about Clinton's email that was also an undecided voter?

I would argue this was a very well timed bit of thermite thrown on the fire that was a decision factor for quite a lot of fence sitters. People's allegiances this election are FAR FAR FAR less black and white and pretty much everyone was led to believe.

At that point, who really cared about Clinton's email that was also an undecided voter?

I would argue this was a very well timed bit of thermite thrown on the fire that was a decision factor for quite a lot of fence sitters. People's allegiances this election are FAR FAR FAR less black and white and pretty much everyone was led to believe.

There was very little allegiances this election. A large chunk of voters were just voting against the other candidate.

Comey is but one of many butterflies whose wings flapped in this election. The economy, the engagement of rural white voters by the democratic party, the effect of 24 hour biased media stations, Citizens United, and more all contributed.

Here what I think really cost her the election in the order of importance:

- People want a change. It's a push back against liberal agendas such as gay marriage, unchecked immigration, and various PC nonsense.- Obama pandering to BLM crap and throwing cops under the bus.- Looking old and frail at times. The NY incident definitely hurt her. People want a strong leader regardless of the party. Hilary wasn't one.- Email scandal would be the last in this list.

This doesn't shock me. Though I'd never blame one thing as the "reason" she didn't win. It was a collection of things. However, whatever Comey's motivations were and regardless of the truth behind what he released less than a week before election day, the shadow of criminality and doubt caused irreparable damage to her as a candidate. It was WILDLY irresponsible for him to do that. His admission later that they found nothing and she was cleared was merely a footnote.

However, Mr. Comey was between a rock and a hard place. Imagine this scenario:1) Comey keeps his mouth shut2) It leaks that emails were found, but "higher authorities", i.e. the Attorney General told him to shut up.3) Republicans go wild and start investigating a (yet another) coverup.4) Chaos ensues.

In this case, Steps 1 through 3 were there, but step 4 still happened.

While Comey may have been the last straw, I think much more damage was done by the failure to secure DNC's email servers. Literally hundreds of thousands of emails that could be quoted out of context. Disaster.

That said, Comey looked corrupt as fuck, especially with that final week heads-up to Congress about investigating more emails, when the tools the FBI has available to it could have told them in minutes whether there was any new data on Weiner's laptop.

It seems to me that jail time would be appropriate, but of course that's not going to happen.

Democrat turnout is why they lost. Democrat turnout was down because, as every person in these comments is saying, the DNC did shady stuff, as reported by the leaks. I think that most people would have still turned out for her, regardless of the FBI investigation (as long as she wasn't convicted of some crime).

However, when all the Bernie supporters learned of the DNC stuff, they all just stayed home, rather than rallying behind the candidate, like the Republicans always do.

Nobody cared about her emails during secretary of state and having her own private server, except for the republicans who already hated her for Cattle futures. Democrats cared when the democratic party was exposed in the way it was, with innuendo and a belief that their own party was corrupt and colluding against themselves.

That's the narrative that won, regardless of any other facts or what those DNC emails actually said. That didn't matter once the millennials and other fringe supporters were disgusted by the process.

"It was somebody else's fault" -- Guy leading an organization that used hundreds of millions of dollars and the help of two of the most charismatic humans* currently living to somehow lose to the most hated person ever to run for president.

The Dems put up a self-serving, corrupt, unlikeable candidate with a history of not taking any responsibility for her actions who is heavily tied to Obama's foreign policy. Can't figure out why she lost.

While that was certainly part of the cause, I hope those at the DNC don't fool themselves into thinking that was the only reason.

HRC had 6 million fewer voters come out for her than for Obama in 2012, even though she ran on all the same policies as him. Figure out every aspect of what went wrong and correct it. Comey shares some blame, but not 100% of it.

I think the issue is a lot more complex and nuanced that Podesta and others are suggesting. Certainly this election still has me flabbergasted. However, if we can stop with the quick answers we might slowly learn something about ourselves as Americans that will bring greater wholeness and healing.

Quick answers that stop our deeper curiosity and discomfort will halt any deeper understanding about ourselves as a people. And that would be sad..